#SaveCodeshare: A Cocktail Event

This Tuesday, OFE hosted a cocktail event as part of the SaveCodeshare.eu campaign. We had inspiring interventions by GitHub, Red Hat, European DIGITAL SME Alliance and Roberto Di Cosmo at Le Grand Central in Brussels. Most importantly, however, we had an energetic audience of both open source software developers and policy wonks. In and age when digital issues are high on the political agenda, it is crucial to bring these two groups together.

After going through the fundamentals of what open source software is, and the central role it plays in Europe’s digital transformation and industrial competitiveness, we moved on to our more immediate concern: the state of play of the Copyright Directive.

We took the opportunity to make our case for how open source software fits in with copyright law and how policymakers can help protect the EU’s software industry, including SMEs. The public and private sectors of Member States and of the EU rely heavily on open source software and code-sharing platforms to innovate and compete globally so this topic has broad relevance to policymakers and developers alike.